BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION

By DAVID WILLIS McCULLOUGH

Published: September 17, 1995

THE DOUBLE TONGUE By William Golding. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.

This unfinished novella set in ancient Greece had been through two drafts at the time of William Golding's death in 1993, as we learn in an introductory note from the publisher. At least one more was apparently planned, and is much needed. The publisher's note also says that the author had not settled on a title. The one selected from several he used appears early in the text, when the narrator, Arieka, picked as a 15-year-old to be a handmaid of Apollo at Delphi, notes that the god "speaks with a double tongue." This is a good choice, since the book as it stands is very much about speech and the sound of speech. For more than 60 years, Arieka has been the Pythia, the human mouthpiece of the oracle. It is a debased time. Greece is now dominated by Rome (a young Julius Caesar appears, briefly, to get a typically opaque reading of his career prospects), and Delphi has become little more than a tourist trap. One of Arieka's more entertaining notions is that a god becomes trivial when his worshipers make only trivial demands of him. To put a better face on things, she learns to speak in hexameters, so that Apollo will sound like Homer -- which, everyone knows, is how gods sounded in the good old days. While the plot is thin to the point of nonexistence and has its ragged points and omissions, Arieka's wry voice is a resounding success. She speaks to us as a very old woman looking back over a gilded career that she respects but has never been able to take seriously. One of the perks -- or plagues -- of being a Nobel Prize winner is that your heirs get to publish whatever they find on your desk. It is hard to believe that William Golding would be altogether pleased with this particular book, but Arieka's voice saves him from embarrassment. DAVID WILLIS MC CULLOUGH